Ballmer on His Departure, Success, Failure and the Future

Microsoft surprised Wall Street and the technology world when it announced Friday that CEO Steve Ballmer would retire after 13 years at the helm. The news raises a lot of questions about what’s next for Microsoft, who is in line to succeed and just what is the 57-year-old Ballmer’s legacy.

Ballmer told the Seattle Times that he is retiring now because if waited until his youngest son went to college, as he had considered, that would put his departure smack in the middle of a big company transition. That echoes what he said in his memo to employees Friday. Ballmer told the Times his decision wasn’t prompted by pressure from shareholders, and he told ZDNet that it had nothing to do with the short term.

While Ballmer wasn’t named to the special committee that will look for the next CEO, he told the Times he will “have a voice” in the decision and that he isn’t shy. Thompson backed that up, saying he didn’t know how you find Microsoft’s CEO without getting his input.

The board does have a profile of what it wants in its next CEO, Thompson told the Times, though he didn’t provide any details or say whether there were any leading candidates — internal or external. He told ZDNet that Microsoft is “well down the path in the search.”

Ballmer told the Times he was proudest of his longevity with Microsoft, and the company’s growth over that period. He shrugged off the company’s stagnant stock price — “I’m not a stock price focused guy” — saying he cared more about products. On that front, he said the entire episode of the loathed Windows Vista operating system was his biggest disappointment.

Microsoft’s future, Ballmer told ZDNet, is about in delivering a great experience for the consumer spanning hardware and software. The company doesn’t want to just be an enterprise or business-customer company like IBM. His example was email. “If you’re going to be in e-mail, you’re going to be in e-mail. You can’t say, okay, I only want to be in enterprise e-mail,” he told ZDNet. (He used devices as an example, too. So, yes, Microsoft is sticking with hardware.) Thompson chimed in: the “consumerization” of IT is happening, and Microsoft is going to be involved in that.

Ballmer plans to stay in Seattle after his retires, he told the Times, but otherwise hasn’t made any plans yet.